How do you do and happy All Souls' Eve to y'all,
The book that also was read by yours truly in high school is Bram Stoker's Dracula, the great novel that features vampires, if not the most infamous. This was something I read as early as 8th grade and it stuck straight through high school and college. For the most part, it was because it was an miniature epic, with many tropes of one that you might find in The Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia as well as Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and the Olympians. The basic epic of an embodiment of evil opposed by a group of unique individuals: the every man, the brain, the scientist, the female hero, etc. So, Dracula is basically those epic fantasy novels, only on a smaller scale and it preceded them all. Of course, it has been adopted to film very frequent, such as the famous 1931 movie with Bela Lugosi as the Count, the 1960s era with Sir Christopher Lee (the man most of you know as Saruman, Count Dooku, and Willy Wonka's father) as the Count, opposite Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing, and many other films. For the most part, they rarely got some of the elements of the novel right: often excluding scenes or characters and relying on mythology to tell the tale. So, the book has to be taken into account to really see how the Count is in Stoker's book (and despite the use of the title, he is not going to start counting like in Sesame Street).
The book's narrative is mostly a series of journal and newspaper entries that basically are eyewitness reports of the Count's actions. In short, it's an epistolary novel. In such a novel, characters do the narrating as opposed to an omnipresent narrator covering it all. It works to a degree with Dracula, though a suspension of disbelief may be required as the characters who write in diaries are shown making detailed descriptions and recording conversations while most of us only do it in a few sentences. You can read Anne Frank's diary and see an example of that. The result of that is something that requires disbelieving in the fact Dr. Jack Seward could memorize and quote verbatim his conversations with Dr. Van Helsing or Harker could jot down the Count's speeches as it they had it all dictated to them, or getting it all transcribed, where most of us could barely remember a conversation of something that happened for real. I could give examples of my own, but that is distracting from the analysis.
From this kind of storytelling, we get a picture of the novel's plot. In the spring (possibly of the year the book was published, since it doesn't even include a year, let alone those annoying 18-- seen in some novels), a solicitor named Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania on an errand to arrange the purchase of a house in England by a count named Dracula. The peasants are scared for Harker's safety and one gives him a crucifix for protection, though Harker seems amazed at the Count's politeness. Scholars of Stoker will point out that there is apparently a backstory, which was published after his death as "Dracula's Guest", though if you read the text you might not see Harker's name mentioned and the events are never brought up in the chapters. The Count is the last person you would see at the front door, yet he greets Harker with a lamp as though he were a footman and gives Harker a room and food while they discuss the house and being in British society. However, as time goes by, Harker begins to notice things out of the ordinary. The Count has no servants, which is the first clue of things unusual. Then he notes the Count doesn't cast a reflection in mirrors or shadows on walls. He sees him crawl on the wall like Spiderman twice and seems to know when the wolves are near. Eventually, as summer arrives, Harker deduces he is not on business, but is held prisoner by the Count who is not really alone. The three ladies appear once and one tries to "kiss" him, only for the Count to hold her back. Eventually, he believes he is imprisoned by vampires, one of whom has something in mind for England.
The novel then cuts back to England during the summer where Mina Murray and Lucy Westernra are introduced. Lucy announces her engagement to Arthur Holmwood, later Lord Godalming upon the death of his father. Arthur has friends who also courted Lucy, Dr. Jack Seward, head of an insane asylum, and Quincy Morris, the American gentleman to serve as the token minority trope (a modern update would have made him a black man for that purpose). Lucy and Mina celebrate the engagement by going to Whitby and then a Russian ship called the Demeter arrives with her captain and crew dead (just like in the climax of The Lost World: Jurassic Park). From the captain's log, the Count has gotten aboard the ship via boxes of earth and feasted on the crewmen during the long voyage. An investigation is made after the Demeter crashes into the harbor in the midst of a strange summer storm, where the log book reveals all. A dog was reported to have jumped from the ship. No doubt, the reader knows the dog is actually the Count, who also morphs into a bat to monitor his victims. During his stay, he causes Lucy to sleep walk into a cemetery where he has his way with her, before Mina catches up and startles them. Lucy reveals to have no knowledge of the event and Mina thinks it was something with her sleep walking. In August, she gets a letter from Hungary that Harker is in the hospital and ill. She then goes there and he recovers in time for a makeshift wedding to happen.
While Mina is away, Lucy grows ill. Jack enlists the help of Professor Van Helsing, the one character the journals refrain from calling on a first name basis. Van Helsing and Jack Seward occupy this section of the book, removing Harker as the protagonist. When they see Lucy, they see she has weakened and lost alot of blood, some how, from an injury to the neck that doesn't bleed. To be less redundant, I'll say that four blood transfusions are performed: first with Arthur, who arrives unexpectedly that morning, then with Seward, then with Van Helsing, and finally with Morris, each time fills her veins but doesn't reverse the illness. Van Helsing suspects and gets garlic in, once. Then the Count gets a wolf to escape from the zoo, which later breaks into the Westernra house and give Lucy's mother a fatal heart attack. Lucy dies, also, on a later date, and arose from the dead as a vampire. Evidence of her is from the empty coffin in her tomb and the reports of children being met with by the "Bloofer Lady". Van Helsing then has the three men gather and they do away with Lucy the Vampire and allow the real Lucy to sleep in peace. That is when Van Helsing learns of Mina and Harker, who tell him of the Count, which allows him to connect the dots and decide that Count Dracula is a vampire from Romania come to feast on English blood.
They all decide to oppose the Count. The men go about to destroy the coffins that the Count sleeps in while placing Mina in the insane asylum where Renfield, a prototype Peter Pettigrew to Count Dracula's Lord Vordemort, if you will, resides and catches flies. Of course, they are sorry for it when Renfield reveals the Count has been coming in to the building, and he has been drinking Mina's blood. The men rush upstairs and catch the Count in the act. Mina tells them that the Count threatened Harker, which basically makes the event akin to rape. Worse, the Count gives slip and destroys their documents to hide all evidence of his existence (though another copy was kept hidden, which is why one needs to do the same) while taking his remaining coffin and robbing a bank to secure a passage home. The group go into Europe, while Mina is given protection from the Count (resulting in a scar on her head) and tells them of his location in hypnosis.
Eventually, they race back to Transylvania. Van Helsing and Mina go on ahead and face the vampire women who attempt the lure the now partially a vampire Mina to their side. Van Helsing kills them and makes the last coffin sanctified of the Count. The rest catch up to the Count who is driven to his castle by Gypsies (more on that later) where the climatic scuffle ensures, ending with the Count defeated, Mina cured, though a hero is lost in the process. The epilogue reveals that Mina and Harker then have a boy, named Quincey, and he said to one day understand how brave his mother was.
The age old battle of good against evil is played to the eleven in Dracula where the Count symbolizes the ultimate evil as a vampire. While the synopsis above shows all, the Count does not get his own point of view written down. In fact, even being the title character keeps the Count from being present for most of the novel. We first "see" the Count in his castle to welcome Harker in and see him in his actions there. Once out of Transylvania, the Count is held back to add in suspense. Kind of like in some monster movie where very little of the monster is shown in order to make it more scary. In likewise manner, Count Dracula keeps from showing up other than in his disguises. He is spotted and identified by Harker in one scene[1], appears to threaten Renfield, then visits Mina where he is forced to retreat from the sight of a crucifix. For all his power, the Count never fights the heroes personally, because they pull out religious symbols and he retreats before them (otherwise even the combined efforts of the five men are no match for the Count). The one time he faces the men directly is in the bank[2], which ends in a short time after springing away and giving them the slip. After that, we don't see him again until the final show down where he is killed. So, of the 371 pages in the book, the Count appears a small fraction of them and has very little dialogue, apart from his speeches in the first four chapters.
On the matter, let's talk about the Count. Through Bela Lugosi's portrayal in the 1931 film, we see him as something of a gentleman in black with the heart of a libertine, a fallen angel to be redeemed in love from a reincarnated wife like in Bram Stoker's Dracula, or the epitome of the vampire count character that inspired Count Van Count (a child friendly vampire who doesn't drink blood, can walk out in the sunlight with great ease, and like to count just about anything) in Sesame Street or Count Chocula. All this, of course, is popular culture re-imagination. In the book, the Count doesn't resemble anything in the movies (though Gary Oldmen came close with his mustache). For most, the closest to the book in any portrayal is found in the silent film Nosferatu, a German film made without permission of the Widow Stoker, and done with the changes in everything from setting to character names (even the vampire is renamed). At least with Count Orlaf, he has the creepy enough vibe that you wouldn't want to run into him anywhere (especially at night). It shows the main thing with the Count that he is not someone you would want to visit to sell Bibles or go while Trick o Treating. For all that, there is something to mention when discussing Count Dracula.
Vlad III Teppes seems like the name of a dead white man to our eyes (most of us wouldn't even known how to pronounce it) but believe it or not, the man they called Vlad the Impaler, is the inspiration for Dracula. Given his reputation as a blood spilling warrior, all the keep Romania from falling under the Turks, it might seem justified to make him a vampire. Of course, some of it is artistic license and some of it is mistaken. The real Dracula wasn't a Transylvanian Count, but a Wallachian Prince[3]. He was ruling over a principality in modern Romania, which will include Bucharest near the end of his life. His father did own a town in Transylvania, but that doesn't mean Dracula was a count in there. Both father and son got the name Dracula from the name Dracul, which derived from the Order of the Dragon, a fearsome creature, which also means "Devil." So, in short, Stoker made him Count Devil, which is even used in one chapter[4]. This is something of the Western mindset as the current Republic of Romania views Vlad III as a national hero, just as we in the States view George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In both cases, there's a man of his time who takes center stage in a nation defining era and leads men into battle more than once. There, the two, or three, differ. As referenced in the book, Dracula led armies into battle against the Ottoman Turks. He got the name Vlad the Impaler for having his enemies impaled on the battle field where they died slowly and painfully. Say what you will of Washington owning slaves and Lincoln suspending Habeus Corpus, but Vlad the Impaler had methods of fighting the Turks that if done today would be considered atrocities, such as beheading envoys under the promise of keeping their turbans on (but he was defending his home against an invader, after all). One thing interesting was prior to that, Vlad was held hostage in Turkey where he learned how to ride horses and do philosophy (both of which he would use against the Turks later). Besides Turkish soldiers, he also impaled Saxon merchants who allied with enemy Boyars. Of course, like with Lincoln, he was killed by his own people who exiled him to Hungary while the Turks eventually took over Wallachia and placed Vlad's brother in the seat of power.
The portrayal of the Count is also the ideal character of the Vampire Villain, or Villain in a Coffin, which I brought up in The Nightmare Before Christmas: Review and Commentary, though more active than Oogie Boogie. The Count has awesome power: he can control the weather, control animals, and people, apparently. He can turn himself into a mist or into any animal know. He can go from young to old at will. He also has the strength of twenty men. It's no wonder that he is someone to fear, yet he does require a coffin because he draws his power from his native soil, because apparently British soil doesn't help. That is why he placed Romanian dirt in his coffins before sailing the seas. The daylight makes it harder for him to be active, also, which is why is mostly seen at night (good thing Stoker doesn't have the last fight happening on the Winter Solstice when the night lasts very long). While in his coffin, the Count is helpless and needs minions to do his dirt work, or rather transport him places. That's where those Gypsies came in and they do so for the honor of serving a noblemen, if they are not under his spell. Finally, the fact that he spends time in his coffin in the day suggests frailty in him, as Harker could attack with his spade without notice and vampires are killed with a stake in the heart in the same way (and they sleep with their eyes open). When vampires are in their coffins, they are very vulnerable and don't even defend themselves from an attacker.
One thing that is disappointing to readers when reading the book is how the Count is defeated. For the most part, his defeat is anti-climatic because all that build up to catch him before the sun sets doesn't come with a proper pay off (that stake driven into his heart). Instead, the Count is killed by Harker slicing his throat with a big knife and then Morris drives his Bowie knife into the Count's chest. Yeah, you read that right: the Count is defeated by conventional blades after all that build up of vampires repelled or killed by religious artifacts, which is something that some people might think of in another case of an unstoppable monster. If you ever go to San Antonio and see the Alamo, you'll actually find the chapter quoted when talking about Bowie's famous knife, where it's treated by Texans as a source of pride in knowing the weapon made in honor of the fallen hero at the Alamo is the same that kills the vampire (ironically, in both cases the man wielding the said weapon die). I'm sure readers from Texas looking over this or reading that part of the book are smiling big with that knowledge (which says something, as Jim Bowie wasn't a Texan but from Louisiana; an American expatriate who became a Mexican citizen and later rebelled against his adopted country, led his fellow rebels in minor battles at the start, only to be sick in bed during the war's most famous siege, where he was practically, already dead by the time the Mexican soldiers came over the walls). Well, enough with that rambling.
Stoker's novel contains many of the Victorian British perceptions of foreigners. We have the idea that noblemen are "noble" if they are British while continental ones are villains, that Eastern societies are bizarre and backward, that Hungarians and Romanians are superstitious peasants or Gypsies, Americans are cowboys, and Dutchmen speak pidgin English and yet are able to think things out better than most can. This in contrast to that English men are saviors of the world and women are represented as ideal women: either as sweet and chaste damsels like Lucy or resourceful mother figures like Mina (the latter can be seen as a strong woman with the way she handles herself in the struggle). It basically does make Dracula rather Anglocentric in the way it views the world, and the Count's arrival seems like an invasion of the continent into Great Britain, the center of civilization in the 19th Century. In fact, there is the deal of the Gypsies in Transylvania who are slaves to the Count. It is the fact that they work for a nobleman, but in this case it does fall on some perception of what we call "Romani" who exist outside of the popular European circles with their bizarre rituals and hidden knowledge. Their ability to tell fortunes and read palms is a stereotype, some of which they played up for money. I have no doubt that Stoker knew how they were perceived in public and was willing to go along with it by having them serve the Count. They intercept Harker's letters and return them to the Count, transport him to the dock to be sent to London, and transport him to his castle. In the climax of the book, they prove to be tough fighters, yet are easy to scare. (I am sure some of them may actually read the book, but skip over the negative portions, but don't take my word for it.)
At the same time, Stoker subverts it. The British characters do a lot of talking, yet the Dutch born Van Helsing can also think and he does some action against the Count. At the same time, the American Quincy Morris is brave and bold, as well as self sacrificing. There is even a Hungarian nun who nurses Harker and sees to the makeshift wedding between him and Mina. An innkeeper and his wife were also nice, and wise as the latter suggests that Harker not go into Transylvania and even hands him a crucifix. Even the Russian captain is viewed as a hero by the English population and given a proper funeral, as opposed to believing him insane.
One noticeable theme in Dracula, that sometimes comes with the Vampire Mythos, is sex. Using the basis of the old Demon lover mythology, the Count illustrates sex with his bite and some ritual action that could be considered penetration. Much of it is not described in the book, but the vampire bite can be likened to a hickie, that thing teenagers sometimes give each other at certain levels of their relationship. I have even been told that the vampire's fangs are practically phallic, which could explain the common image of the vampire as a male who seduces a pure and virgin woman. Then there is the Count spotted by the Harkers on three where he has become young, with a pointed beard, and staring at a young girl, as though to combine a negative image of a Jew with a pedophile. The last does bring up a negative implications with the way the Count targets certain victims. In fact, the sort of scare among white men of interracial sex between white women and a non-white man can be noticed with the way Stoker has the Count target the women. Here, two young, English mortal women are seduced and corrupt by an ancient, Transylvanian vampire man, in what is not only interspecies rape, but a classic case of the older libertine debauching the ingenue. Reading between the lines, we can see the Count with Lucy in a way we wouldn't want to think of (and the 1992 movie had to show it) which is really the Count taking advantage of Lucy's state of trance. No surprise as some of the Victorian erotica played on the fears and gave women a window to sexual desire with fantasies of rape (often an English woman with some exotic man from overseas). In Stoker, the vampire is in place of a ravaging Turk, an Arab sheik, a Mexican bandit, or a jungle dwelling native. Mina later has a dream of a mist coming into the bedroom and seeing two red dots that form into a face, which the reader no doubt knows is actually the Count bending over her. When she narrates her tale, the Count makes her drink some of his blood from a chest wound. Once more, one has to read between the lines and realize this is some kind of fellatio. Even the way Seward describe the image is likened to it. Modern readers might not notice it, but the Count has hairy palms that Victorian readers believed is the result of masturbation and would have thought when the Count is in his coffin he was getting his kicks in ways one would in the privacy of home in the drawing room (no doubt, any of the men, or even Stoker himself, knew someone who kept secret rooms for private viewings of art, as opposed to going out and spending pounds to a syphilis afflicted prostitute). This could make a vampire the metaphor to the 21st century as an obsessive stalker and serial rapist, though I won't compare vampirism to AIDS or any STD as it demonizes the victims of either or.
While the predatory advances on the women are well known, the book also has men being victims, though most of it is off screen (which is something homosexual readers might be grateful for). The Count does threaten Harker, though the crucifix keeps him at bay and it seems he is saving him for his wicked purposes only to toss him to the three vampire women. The descriptions of vampire attacks on men are instead done with the opposite sex. The three vampire ladies (whom the description of invokes an image of the Sanderson Sisters from Hocus Pocus in my mind) come upon Harker and talk of kissing him, a euphemism for sucking his blood. One thing to take note is that they are willing to take turns and let the prettiest of the bunch go first. Another thing is two of them have the same brows as the Count, implying them to be cousins, or sisters, of his. Later, once Lucy is a vampire, she is seen as completely different from her past self. One could liken this as an example of the Madonna / Whore complex where the sweet and chaste Lucy is delightful as a mortal woman with all the dreams of becoming a simple wife of an earl, now becomes ugly and voluptuous as a vampire, molesting children and even attempting to seduce Arthur. The fact she wears white while a vampire adds another mockery, that sort of feeds into some men's worries over the bride in the upcoming marriage (or discovering the angel he married is in reality a blood sucking monster), and Lord knows what other kind of image that gets one labeled a misogynist for thinking of them. Of course, when Lucy is a vampire, the men have no cure for her other than a stake driven through her heart and it's done by her fiance (which almost goes on par with honor killings if he were already married to her). When Mina is seduced, the men know what will happen and decide to kill the Count before he converts more and Harker is willing to sleep with his wife despite the fears of what she may do to him (even make love to her, as Van Helsing shoos all out of the room when the two get into an embrace at one point[5]). However, they are delaying the inevitable and if they fail and Mina becomes a vampire --- well, that is something they regret might happen and then it's Lucy round two.
The thing of the foreigner coming after the English women was something brought up and will be mentioned here. We get the case of a group of white European males, three of them of English stock, pitted against the Count who embodies a non-white foreigner, in what one could say is a reuse of the narrative of a white man defending his home from waves of minorities. Once more, it makes white women objects to defend and the seducing of them from the minorities makes them damaged goods who are no better off than to be forgotten or killed. It's the sort of thing rehashed every time I hear about the Muslim immigrants going into Europe, today, and the hysteria of white people bred out through Africans taking white European women in the process, all in the name of Multiculturalism. Those people who speak of that are basically using that same old narrative that makes white women objects and minorities as villains (and people who talk of white women being made for minorities like in certain Youtube channels are equally guilty of objectifying them, this time as objects of sexual conquests). At the same time, the cure to vampires has a connection to the minorities of the said locations where reports are made of women being killed for getting raped and some are executed after converting to Islam. No doubt, they are also having their narratives that make women objects of value and men who defend them be heroes against wicked minorities.
Now, I know some of what we know of today did not exist in Stoker's time. Somehow, outside of fiction, the Victorians seem to have a much greater respect for women (a woman was ruling the world, by the way) that the idea of objectifying them was abhorrent to them. Some of that respect is seen in the book, also. Harker does fret over Mina learning of the vampire women and doesn't say anything negative about women. Best of all, while the men have their faults the one person to really hold it through during the worst of it is Mina. She thinks things through quicker than her own husband, she assists Van Helsing in solving the mystery of Lucy's demise, she gets to Renfield better than Seward, and she can hold her own as opposed to the beta male like Arthur Holmwood. Given that she takes so much during the book, almost becoming a vampire, yet is able to assist in getting group to oppose him and think out a logical escape route of the Count, Mina is a strong woman. One thing I admire with Stoker is unlike Hollywood, he lets Mina be beautiful and smart at once. Though she takes a shot at them, she is also one of the "New Women", the forerunner of the flappers, the feminists, the butch girls, and other sorts of women who are ingrained with Women's Lib that some of us have come to know and take for granted: the women who do more than the domestic actions and take on male occupations. Mina's role in secretarial position in learning shorthand and stenography might not seem much to modern women, but in 1897 she was very far ahead, in contrast to Lucy whose goal is to marry (selecting an English lord in the process). Ultimately, Lucy's traditional stance is what kills her while Mina perseveres, which suggests that Stoker was aware of the times; that women like Lucy were fading away and women like Mina were the future. Lucy might not make in the 20th Century, but Mina could[6].
The century is enough to bring up several things of technology. Mina writes her journal with a typewriter, as opposed to making entries on computer like today. Jack Seward records his on a phonograph, which is just like some would speak in a recording device, and today it's now easier to find a specific entry, unlike in the book. Van Helsing's blood transfusions are a breakthrough of the time, though dated as nothing is said of blood typing (which is useful as the wrong type would have killed Lucy) and the method of storage blood for future blood loss is not thought of because it didn't come into practice until 1913. Scenes in London, in stark contrast to Romania, reveal people using bicycles and automobiles, the telephone can be found in an office, and the city is lite with lamps. Even with travel where Van Helsing arrives in London on the day after receiving a telegram from Seward, which seems fast to the reader if no consideration is given to the steam ferries and the trains that cut travel time from Amsterdam to London down to a mere day where before it took two or three. The train has even made it possible for Harker to reach Transylvania in a week (today the airplane would reduce that to three hours) with a few more days travel by road. Contrast to the Count's means of transportation by boat that takes weeks to reach Varna. Some of those have been updated since the book was published.
More importantly, the way Dracula is an epic novel is the theme of good against evil clearly presented. True, it's a bit slanted with the Christian men on the good side and the Gypsies on the bad, but we can pardon the latter as the Gypsies have no malice to the English but are merely obeying orders, as well as the standard West against East. The actions of the vampire illustrate evil through the way it mocks many aspects of Christianity (Lucy's tomb scene is a ghastly remake of the three women discovering the empty Tomb, for example). The theme is more presented with the Count as the embodiment of evil as he plots and plans to conquer civilization, represented by Great Britain, and make everyone his minion. In line that is used by Tolkien, the band of heroes seeks to prevent that and it requires leaving the comforts of home to do it. As we see in the journal entries, the humans all have lives: Arthur was planning to marry Lucy, Mina and Harker were to enjoy a happy life as a couple, and Dr. Seward was making his work in science, yet all of that was put aside because they were fighting a war against an invading force that sought to ruin their lives. Or better yet, from a theological perspective, is there to ruin everyone's souls.
Notes:
1. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (1897) Page. 179.
2. Stoker. Pg. 311-2
3. Lallanilla, Marc. "The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler." Live Science.
4. Stoker. Pg. 279.
5. Pg. 314-5.
6. Boyd, Kathryn. "Making Sense of Mina: Stoker's Vampirization of Victorian Women." (2014)
Bibliography.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Originally published by Archibald Constable and Company in London. (1897).
Boyd, Kathryn. "Making Sense of Mina: Stoker's Vampirization Of Victorian Women" (2014). English Honors Thesis. 20. http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/eng_honors/20
Lallanilla, Marc. "The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler". Live Science. www.livescience.com. (2017).
The age old battle of good against evil is played to the eleven in Dracula where the Count symbolizes the ultimate evil as a vampire. While the synopsis above shows all, the Count does not get his own point of view written down. In fact, even being the title character keeps the Count from being present for most of the novel. We first "see" the Count in his castle to welcome Harker in and see him in his actions there. Once out of Transylvania, the Count is held back to add in suspense. Kind of like in some monster movie where very little of the monster is shown in order to make it more scary. In likewise manner, Count Dracula keeps from showing up other than in his disguises. He is spotted and identified by Harker in one scene[1], appears to threaten Renfield, then visits Mina where he is forced to retreat from the sight of a crucifix. For all his power, the Count never fights the heroes personally, because they pull out religious symbols and he retreats before them (otherwise even the combined efforts of the five men are no match for the Count). The one time he faces the men directly is in the bank[2], which ends in a short time after springing away and giving them the slip. After that, we don't see him again until the final show down where he is killed. So, of the 371 pages in the book, the Count appears a small fraction of them and has very little dialogue, apart from his speeches in the first four chapters.
On the matter, let's talk about the Count. Through Bela Lugosi's portrayal in the 1931 film, we see him as something of a gentleman in black with the heart of a libertine, a fallen angel to be redeemed in love from a reincarnated wife like in Bram Stoker's Dracula, or the epitome of the vampire count character that inspired Count Van Count (a child friendly vampire who doesn't drink blood, can walk out in the sunlight with great ease, and like to count just about anything) in Sesame Street or Count Chocula. All this, of course, is popular culture re-imagination. In the book, the Count doesn't resemble anything in the movies (though Gary Oldmen came close with his mustache). For most, the closest to the book in any portrayal is found in the silent film Nosferatu, a German film made without permission of the Widow Stoker, and done with the changes in everything from setting to character names (even the vampire is renamed). At least with Count Orlaf, he has the creepy enough vibe that you wouldn't want to run into him anywhere (especially at night). It shows the main thing with the Count that he is not someone you would want to visit to sell Bibles or go while Trick o Treating. For all that, there is something to mention when discussing Count Dracula.
Vlad III Teppes seems like the name of a dead white man to our eyes (most of us wouldn't even known how to pronounce it) but believe it or not, the man they called Vlad the Impaler, is the inspiration for Dracula. Given his reputation as a blood spilling warrior, all the keep Romania from falling under the Turks, it might seem justified to make him a vampire. Of course, some of it is artistic license and some of it is mistaken. The real Dracula wasn't a Transylvanian Count, but a Wallachian Prince[3]. He was ruling over a principality in modern Romania, which will include Bucharest near the end of his life. His father did own a town in Transylvania, but that doesn't mean Dracula was a count in there. Both father and son got the name Dracula from the name Dracul, which derived from the Order of the Dragon, a fearsome creature, which also means "Devil." So, in short, Stoker made him Count Devil, which is even used in one chapter[4]. This is something of the Western mindset as the current Republic of Romania views Vlad III as a national hero, just as we in the States view George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. In both cases, there's a man of his time who takes center stage in a nation defining era and leads men into battle more than once. There, the two, or three, differ. As referenced in the book, Dracula led armies into battle against the Ottoman Turks. He got the name Vlad the Impaler for having his enemies impaled on the battle field where they died slowly and painfully. Say what you will of Washington owning slaves and Lincoln suspending Habeus Corpus, but Vlad the Impaler had methods of fighting the Turks that if done today would be considered atrocities, such as beheading envoys under the promise of keeping their turbans on (but he was defending his home against an invader, after all). One thing interesting was prior to that, Vlad was held hostage in Turkey where he learned how to ride horses and do philosophy (both of which he would use against the Turks later). Besides Turkish soldiers, he also impaled Saxon merchants who allied with enemy Boyars. Of course, like with Lincoln, he was killed by his own people who exiled him to Hungary while the Turks eventually took over Wallachia and placed Vlad's brother in the seat of power.
The portrayal of the Count is also the ideal character of the Vampire Villain, or Villain in a Coffin, which I brought up in The Nightmare Before Christmas: Review and Commentary, though more active than Oogie Boogie. The Count has awesome power: he can control the weather, control animals, and people, apparently. He can turn himself into a mist or into any animal know. He can go from young to old at will. He also has the strength of twenty men. It's no wonder that he is someone to fear, yet he does require a coffin because he draws his power from his native soil, because apparently British soil doesn't help. That is why he placed Romanian dirt in his coffins before sailing the seas. The daylight makes it harder for him to be active, also, which is why is mostly seen at night (good thing Stoker doesn't have the last fight happening on the Winter Solstice when the night lasts very long). While in his coffin, the Count is helpless and needs minions to do his dirt work, or rather transport him places. That's where those Gypsies came in and they do so for the honor of serving a noblemen, if they are not under his spell. Finally, the fact that he spends time in his coffin in the day suggests frailty in him, as Harker could attack with his spade without notice and vampires are killed with a stake in the heart in the same way (and they sleep with their eyes open). When vampires are in their coffins, they are very vulnerable and don't even defend themselves from an attacker.
One thing that is disappointing to readers when reading the book is how the Count is defeated. For the most part, his defeat is anti-climatic because all that build up to catch him before the sun sets doesn't come with a proper pay off (that stake driven into his heart). Instead, the Count is killed by Harker slicing his throat with a big knife and then Morris drives his Bowie knife into the Count's chest. Yeah, you read that right: the Count is defeated by conventional blades after all that build up of vampires repelled or killed by religious artifacts, which is something that some people might think of in another case of an unstoppable monster. If you ever go to San Antonio and see the Alamo, you'll actually find the chapter quoted when talking about Bowie's famous knife, where it's treated by Texans as a source of pride in knowing the weapon made in honor of the fallen hero at the Alamo is the same that kills the vampire (ironically, in both cases the man wielding the said weapon die). I'm sure readers from Texas looking over this or reading that part of the book are smiling big with that knowledge (which says something, as Jim Bowie wasn't a Texan but from Louisiana; an American expatriate who became a Mexican citizen and later rebelled against his adopted country, led his fellow rebels in minor battles at the start, only to be sick in bed during the war's most famous siege, where he was practically, already dead by the time the Mexican soldiers came over the walls). Well, enough with that rambling.
Stoker's novel contains many of the Victorian British perceptions of foreigners. We have the idea that noblemen are "noble" if they are British while continental ones are villains, that Eastern societies are bizarre and backward, that Hungarians and Romanians are superstitious peasants or Gypsies, Americans are cowboys, and Dutchmen speak pidgin English and yet are able to think things out better than most can. This in contrast to that English men are saviors of the world and women are represented as ideal women: either as sweet and chaste damsels like Lucy or resourceful mother figures like Mina (the latter can be seen as a strong woman with the way she handles herself in the struggle). It basically does make Dracula rather Anglocentric in the way it views the world, and the Count's arrival seems like an invasion of the continent into Great Britain, the center of civilization in the 19th Century. In fact, there is the deal of the Gypsies in Transylvania who are slaves to the Count. It is the fact that they work for a nobleman, but in this case it does fall on some perception of what we call "Romani" who exist outside of the popular European circles with their bizarre rituals and hidden knowledge. Their ability to tell fortunes and read palms is a stereotype, some of which they played up for money. I have no doubt that Stoker knew how they were perceived in public and was willing to go along with it by having them serve the Count. They intercept Harker's letters and return them to the Count, transport him to the dock to be sent to London, and transport him to his castle. In the climax of the book, they prove to be tough fighters, yet are easy to scare. (I am sure some of them may actually read the book, but skip over the negative portions, but don't take my word for it.)
At the same time, Stoker subverts it. The British characters do a lot of talking, yet the Dutch born Van Helsing can also think and he does some action against the Count. At the same time, the American Quincy Morris is brave and bold, as well as self sacrificing. There is even a Hungarian nun who nurses Harker and sees to the makeshift wedding between him and Mina. An innkeeper and his wife were also nice, and wise as the latter suggests that Harker not go into Transylvania and even hands him a crucifix. Even the Russian captain is viewed as a hero by the English population and given a proper funeral, as opposed to believing him insane.
One noticeable theme in Dracula, that sometimes comes with the Vampire Mythos, is sex. Using the basis of the old Demon lover mythology, the Count illustrates sex with his bite and some ritual action that could be considered penetration. Much of it is not described in the book, but the vampire bite can be likened to a hickie, that thing teenagers sometimes give each other at certain levels of their relationship. I have even been told that the vampire's fangs are practically phallic, which could explain the common image of the vampire as a male who seduces a pure and virgin woman. Then there is the Count spotted by the Harkers on three where he has become young, with a pointed beard, and staring at a young girl, as though to combine a negative image of a Jew with a pedophile. The last does bring up a negative implications with the way the Count targets certain victims. In fact, the sort of scare among white men of interracial sex between white women and a non-white man can be noticed with the way Stoker has the Count target the women. Here, two young, English mortal women are seduced and corrupt by an ancient, Transylvanian vampire man, in what is not only interspecies rape, but a classic case of the older libertine debauching the ingenue. Reading between the lines, we can see the Count with Lucy in a way we wouldn't want to think of (and the 1992 movie had to show it) which is really the Count taking advantage of Lucy's state of trance. No surprise as some of the Victorian erotica played on the fears and gave women a window to sexual desire with fantasies of rape (often an English woman with some exotic man from overseas). In Stoker, the vampire is in place of a ravaging Turk, an Arab sheik, a Mexican bandit, or a jungle dwelling native. Mina later has a dream of a mist coming into the bedroom and seeing two red dots that form into a face, which the reader no doubt knows is actually the Count bending over her. When she narrates her tale, the Count makes her drink some of his blood from a chest wound. Once more, one has to read between the lines and realize this is some kind of fellatio. Even the way Seward describe the image is likened to it. Modern readers might not notice it, but the Count has hairy palms that Victorian readers believed is the result of masturbation and would have thought when the Count is in his coffin he was getting his kicks in ways one would in the privacy of home in the drawing room (no doubt, any of the men, or even Stoker himself, knew someone who kept secret rooms for private viewings of art, as opposed to going out and spending pounds to a syphilis afflicted prostitute). This could make a vampire the metaphor to the 21st century as an obsessive stalker and serial rapist, though I won't compare vampirism to AIDS or any STD as it demonizes the victims of either or.
While the predatory advances on the women are well known, the book also has men being victims, though most of it is off screen (which is something homosexual readers might be grateful for). The Count does threaten Harker, though the crucifix keeps him at bay and it seems he is saving him for his wicked purposes only to toss him to the three vampire women. The descriptions of vampire attacks on men are instead done with the opposite sex. The three vampire ladies (whom the description of invokes an image of the Sanderson Sisters from Hocus Pocus in my mind) come upon Harker and talk of kissing him, a euphemism for sucking his blood. One thing to take note is that they are willing to take turns and let the prettiest of the bunch go first. Another thing is two of them have the same brows as the Count, implying them to be cousins, or sisters, of his. Later, once Lucy is a vampire, she is seen as completely different from her past self. One could liken this as an example of the Madonna / Whore complex where the sweet and chaste Lucy is delightful as a mortal woman with all the dreams of becoming a simple wife of an earl, now becomes ugly and voluptuous as a vampire, molesting children and even attempting to seduce Arthur. The fact she wears white while a vampire adds another mockery, that sort of feeds into some men's worries over the bride in the upcoming marriage (or discovering the angel he married is in reality a blood sucking monster), and Lord knows what other kind of image that gets one labeled a misogynist for thinking of them. Of course, when Lucy is a vampire, the men have no cure for her other than a stake driven through her heart and it's done by her fiance (which almost goes on par with honor killings if he were already married to her). When Mina is seduced, the men know what will happen and decide to kill the Count before he converts more and Harker is willing to sleep with his wife despite the fears of what she may do to him (even make love to her, as Van Helsing shoos all out of the room when the two get into an embrace at one point[5]). However, they are delaying the inevitable and if they fail and Mina becomes a vampire --- well, that is something they regret might happen and then it's Lucy round two.
The thing of the foreigner coming after the English women was something brought up and will be mentioned here. We get the case of a group of white European males, three of them of English stock, pitted against the Count who embodies a non-white foreigner, in what one could say is a reuse of the narrative of a white man defending his home from waves of minorities. Once more, it makes white women objects to defend and the seducing of them from the minorities makes them damaged goods who are no better off than to be forgotten or killed. It's the sort of thing rehashed every time I hear about the Muslim immigrants going into Europe, today, and the hysteria of white people bred out through Africans taking white European women in the process, all in the name of Multiculturalism. Those people who speak of that are basically using that same old narrative that makes white women objects and minorities as villains (and people who talk of white women being made for minorities like in certain Youtube channels are equally guilty of objectifying them, this time as objects of sexual conquests). At the same time, the cure to vampires has a connection to the minorities of the said locations where reports are made of women being killed for getting raped and some are executed after converting to Islam. No doubt, they are also having their narratives that make women objects of value and men who defend them be heroes against wicked minorities.
Now, I know some of what we know of today did not exist in Stoker's time. Somehow, outside of fiction, the Victorians seem to have a much greater respect for women (a woman was ruling the world, by the way) that the idea of objectifying them was abhorrent to them. Some of that respect is seen in the book, also. Harker does fret over Mina learning of the vampire women and doesn't say anything negative about women. Best of all, while the men have their faults the one person to really hold it through during the worst of it is Mina. She thinks things through quicker than her own husband, she assists Van Helsing in solving the mystery of Lucy's demise, she gets to Renfield better than Seward, and she can hold her own as opposed to the beta male like Arthur Holmwood. Given that she takes so much during the book, almost becoming a vampire, yet is able to assist in getting group to oppose him and think out a logical escape route of the Count, Mina is a strong woman. One thing I admire with Stoker is unlike Hollywood, he lets Mina be beautiful and smart at once. Though she takes a shot at them, she is also one of the "New Women", the forerunner of the flappers, the feminists, the butch girls, and other sorts of women who are ingrained with Women's Lib that some of us have come to know and take for granted: the women who do more than the domestic actions and take on male occupations. Mina's role in secretarial position in learning shorthand and stenography might not seem much to modern women, but in 1897 she was very far ahead, in contrast to Lucy whose goal is to marry (selecting an English lord in the process). Ultimately, Lucy's traditional stance is what kills her while Mina perseveres, which suggests that Stoker was aware of the times; that women like Lucy were fading away and women like Mina were the future. Lucy might not make in the 20th Century, but Mina could[6].
The century is enough to bring up several things of technology. Mina writes her journal with a typewriter, as opposed to making entries on computer like today. Jack Seward records his on a phonograph, which is just like some would speak in a recording device, and today it's now easier to find a specific entry, unlike in the book. Van Helsing's blood transfusions are a breakthrough of the time, though dated as nothing is said of blood typing (which is useful as the wrong type would have killed Lucy) and the method of storage blood for future blood loss is not thought of because it didn't come into practice until 1913. Scenes in London, in stark contrast to Romania, reveal people using bicycles and automobiles, the telephone can be found in an office, and the city is lite with lamps. Even with travel where Van Helsing arrives in London on the day after receiving a telegram from Seward, which seems fast to the reader if no consideration is given to the steam ferries and the trains that cut travel time from Amsterdam to London down to a mere day where before it took two or three. The train has even made it possible for Harker to reach Transylvania in a week (today the airplane would reduce that to three hours) with a few more days travel by road. Contrast to the Count's means of transportation by boat that takes weeks to reach Varna. Some of those have been updated since the book was published.
More importantly, the way Dracula is an epic novel is the theme of good against evil clearly presented. True, it's a bit slanted with the Christian men on the good side and the Gypsies on the bad, but we can pardon the latter as the Gypsies have no malice to the English but are merely obeying orders, as well as the standard West against East. The actions of the vampire illustrate evil through the way it mocks many aspects of Christianity (Lucy's tomb scene is a ghastly remake of the three women discovering the empty Tomb, for example). The theme is more presented with the Count as the embodiment of evil as he plots and plans to conquer civilization, represented by Great Britain, and make everyone his minion. In line that is used by Tolkien, the band of heroes seeks to prevent that and it requires leaving the comforts of home to do it. As we see in the journal entries, the humans all have lives: Arthur was planning to marry Lucy, Mina and Harker were to enjoy a happy life as a couple, and Dr. Seward was making his work in science, yet all of that was put aside because they were fighting a war against an invading force that sought to ruin their lives. Or better yet, from a theological perspective, is there to ruin everyone's souls.
Notes:
1. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. (1897) Page. 179.
2. Stoker. Pg. 311-2
3. Lallanilla, Marc. "The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler." Live Science.
4. Stoker. Pg. 279.
5. Pg. 314-5.
6. Boyd, Kathryn. "Making Sense of Mina: Stoker's Vampirization of Victorian Women." (2014)
Bibliography.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Originally published by Archibald Constable and Company in London. (1897).
Boyd, Kathryn. "Making Sense of Mina: Stoker's Vampirization Of Victorian Women" (2014). English Honors Thesis. 20. http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/eng_honors/20
Lallanilla, Marc. "The Real Dracula: Vlad the Impaler". Live Science. www.livescience.com. (2017).
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